


Wind

by pprfaith



Series: Run [2]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Southern Vampire Mysteries - Charlaine Harris, True Blood
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Humor, F/M, Gen, POV Second Person, Podfic Available, Telepathy, Unreliable Narrator, mild violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-13
Updated: 2013-04-13
Packaged: 2017-12-08 09:37:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/759882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eric is not sure why he keeps her, this little telepath slayer, but he does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wind

+

You spend two whole weeks in your shiny, tiny car, driving around the country. First upward from Florida, then, for a bit, into Canada. You have business there. After that, back to Seattle. 

Home sweet home. Only not because home is as alien a concept as any other human idea these days. Maybe you’ve been dead for too long. Maybe she’s the cure to that. Or maybe you really should have walked the other way in that damn hotel, should have let her die and saved yourself a heap of trouble. 

But you didn’t. 

You don’t know why, but you didn’t walk away. You stayed. You fought. You almost got riddled with silver bullets. Because of her. Because of the tiny, mostly human slip of a girl who is fast asleep beside you, asleep, like she trusts you, like you’re not dangerous. And she’s using your leather jacket as a pillow, bunching it up under her head periodically. You’ve slaughtered people for less.

But. Butbutbut, now you’re in Seattle. Which isn’t home, but you have a house there and some clubs. They make money. Money is good. This is a good age to make money. So that’s what you do. And now, apparently, you do it with someone named Buffy at your side. You should have walked away. Hell, you should have twisted her sweet little neck yourself. 

But you haven’t. 

Why? Because being around her is… it’s funny, amusing, frustrating, challenging, new, exciting and not familiar. Not anything you know. When you get angry or horny or hungry, it’s almost impossible to pick a fight with her because she picks the intent right out of your brain. But she still gives you the fight, _permits_ it, like you’re a child to be indulged. Only that’s not how it is. She’s spoiling for fights too, for anger and aggression and the few spectacular make out sessions you tricked her into when she wasn’t looking. 

So you pick fights with her and she knows it and still goes along with it. The hunger in her is the same as in you. You feel it. Hunter. Predator. And yet, underneath, she’s a fragile broken thing. Why else would she fall asleep next to the thing that is her death?

You managed to pull most of the pieces out of her over the past few weeks and the picture they paint is familiar. Betrayal, hate, bigotry. The tragedies are always the same. Only the actors change. Still, this one moves you somehow, in a way all others have ceased to do centuries ago. Why? Again that question. When did you start second guessing yourself? You grit your teeth, grip the wheel tighter and try to answer.

Why does her common pain seem so much less common than those of all others? It’s not like you’ve suddenly turned into a bleeding heart, – your heart hasn’t bled in a millennium and that’s just how you like it, thanks a lot - it’s only her. Maybe it’s the contradiction in her, the way she’s strong and weak at the same time. She moves like a predator, but she looks over her shoulder like prey. 

She’s stick thin and her eyes are too big in her hollow, tired face. Still she’s beautiful. She has fire in her, and weariness. She’s old beyond her years and so childish it makes you want to rip her to pieces some nights. She teases you in one moment and falls silent, staring out the window into the night, the next. She’s been on the run for almost a whole year. In human years – teenage years – that’s an age. And she’s been running from the people that were supposed to help her.

She told you, one night, how her watcher – pathetic, the whole lot of them – called the Council for help to free his slayer of the aspect of the demon she acquired. As if the Council ever cared about their tools. You met one once, centuries ago. A hollow girl, broken and stitched back together. She had no spirit, going where she was aimed, killing all in her path. She killed one of your childer. You killed her. But that didn’t sate your thirst for revenge. Breaking the gun does not avenge the crime. 

But her watcher, apparently, was different. He cared. He was still stupid if he thought he would find help. The Council came. They walked into her house, up her stairs, asked her if she was the slayer. She was lying in bed, not quite coherent, and nodded. Then they opened fire. 

And that breaking of trust, that total betrayal, changed something in her. Would change something in any human. And then came the next shock. Help. From those she hunted for years. From creatures like you, who should kill her on sight. Only most of your kind know about slayers, these little broken girls, and you pity them. They are empty things, birds that will never fly. 

But this one, oh, this one. She will fly alright. High and far, across the night sky. She will fly because she hates. Hates the men who tried to kill her, but hates them more because of what they made her do. They made her a killer. For that, she despises them. For that she burns, for that she flies. 

And you want to watch more than you’ve wanted anything in a while. Humans say that the best revenge is living well and you will make sure that she does. To have a slayer, in your life, in your bed, in your world, of her own free will, it’s spitting into the Council’s face. It’s revenge. 

The fun and games and the telepathy are just a bonus, really. 

Only – there have never been so many ‘only’s, so many ‘but’s and ‘why’s in your head before, not ever - that’s how you justified taking her with you two weeks ago. Before you knew her. Now that you do…

You stop the car and get out, opening her door with a flourish so she almost lands on the gravel of your drive before jerking awake. You smirk. She scowls. Then she looks behind you at your house and whistles lowly. 

“Nice digs,” she comments in that terrible slang of hers that makes your teeth ache. You have spoken many languages over the years and feel no particular kinship to the English one, but what she does to it is a crime. Still you let her because it’s different. It’s new. It rubs you the wrong way, agitates you in a refreshing way that reminds you that you may be dead, but you’re not _dead_. 

She climbs out of the car and stands beside you, staring at the white house. It’s perhaps a bit ostentatious and that’s jut how you like it. Intimidating people before they ever ring the doorbell. It keeps the human neighbours away at least. But the way she stands and stares – she’s intimidated.

“This is your house?”

She says house, not home, and you wonder if it’s deliberate. If she understands that difference, understands already that people like you have no home, only places to rest for a while. You wonder if she understands that she is one of those people now. She has demon blood in her. She is not human anymore and she never again will be. 

That is why her watcher’s cure didn’t work. You cannot break blood magic, cannot take back something so potent, so volatile. Either it kills you or it sticks with you. You should know. You’re one of the ones it stuck to. She’s demon and that means no place in the human world will ever be home to her again. This world you both belong to, the world of shadows and midnight, does not look kindly on dreams of picket fences. 

She shifts from one foot to the other, a human motion that is wholly unnecessary. She could stand stock still for days if she wanted to, but she chooses to play human. You’ll have to break her of the habit. It’s annoying and it draws attention to her. But now she’s…nervous?

Suddenly she blurts, “You know, I can get a hotel room somewhere, if that’s better. I still have some money left and it’s probably smarter if I-“ 

If she what? You look at her, eyebrow raised. Why is she balking? She’s not afraid of you. The place is safe, it’s nice, it has comfortable beds. You will not hurt her now when you haven’t hurt her before. You have slept in the same hotel rooms for the past two weeks. So what is her problem?

She looks at you then, sees your question – she reads you like a book, not only inside your head, but also outside and that’s another reason to twist her pretty neck – and cocks her head to one side, opening her mind. It’s something she has started doing in the past few days, answering your unspoken questions by letting you inside her head. 

Stupid, reckless behaviour that will get her killed one day and yet, somehow, it honors you. Which, you think, is why she does it. Everything to do with her is like this, convoluted, layered. Does she do what she does because she wants to or because you want her do? She picks the outcome of any possible scenario from your brain and thus most things you do start at the end, going backwards. In a way, she’s already closer to you than anyone else, including your dear Pamela, has ever been. 

So she opens her mind to you, lets you see why she balks. Finality. Ah, yes. If she enters this house, she enters the lion’s den and seals her fate. If she crosses the threshold she crosses that last line. The line between clinging to humanity and being other. The line between keeping a way out and giving in. This is the point of no return. Afterwards, there will be no amends big enough to allow her to return to the life she once had. 

If she walks through that door, she stops being a slayer, stops being a daughter, a friend to mortals, a girl on the run and becomes instead a friend of vampires, a telepath, a part demon. 

It scares her.

You laugh.

“Now you are scared?” you ask, voce filled with mirth. “You were not scared of a dozen armed men come to kill you, were not scared of sleeping in the same room as a vampire, were not scared of letting me take you wherever I pleased, but you are afraid of crossing the last line?”

“If you put it like that,” she says, “It’s kind of silly, isn’t it?”

Silly is not how you would put it but you shrug. She glares at you again and you know she caught the thought. 

“Darling,” you tell her, not willing to call her Dear One and refusing to call her by her given name, “I do not associate with cowards.”

Then you spin on your heel and walk toward the front door, leaving her to either follow or walk away. 

She follows. 

Her bag lands by the door but out of the way of a hasty entrance or exit. She’s good that way, keeping all routes free. You lead her through the living room into the kitchen. It’s an empty place, never used, stocked only with the essentials to throw of suspicion. It’ll have to do for now. If she wants food, she’ll have to go shopping. Besides, you stopped at one of those horribly smelling fast food joints only a few hours ago. Even with her fast metabolism she can’t be hungry again. She ate enough for a small family. 

You sit at the unused kitchen table and wait until she pulls out a chair on the other side and does the same. For a long moment you look each other in the eye, unmoving, unblinking. It’s not a challenge, not a demand for subservience, but neither is it the usual cowering you get from those around you. It’s simply a look, green eyes on blue, equals. It’s been a long time since anyone has treated you as an equal. A long time since you let anyone get away with it. 

When you were a child, times were hard for your people. Of your nine siblings, only two lived to become adults. Your father was a merchant, a wanderer, a sailor. He put more stock in nature than he did in the gods but he never got angry when another one of his children died. He never cursed the gods, never damned his beloved forces of nature for freezing the crops and blocking the roads. You asked him one night, why he watched his children die and did nothing. Why he knew peace when everything you knew was the hard, angry life of people struggling just to survive another day. He looked at you long and hard and said, “The winds brings, the winds takes away. The wind has its reasons.”

As a boy of twelve, you couldn’t begin to understand that. But then the wind took your life away and brought you endless night. The wind, you learned, has its reasons. Sometimes, that’s all you need to know.

And now the wind brought you Buffy, a human girl who can be, will be, so much more, a girl who fascinates and amuses, angers and intrigues you. So you ask, “What name would you like your new papers to say?”

She shrugs and after a slight hesitation answers, “Josephine for a first name, I think.”

You raise a wordless eyebrow. Josephine? How… quaint. “In honour of whom?”

She rolls her eyes, “Oh please, I’m not completely stupid. The name is in no way connected to my past. At all. I got it from a damn song. So chill.”

So quick to order you around. You consider telling her the effort you’re going to for her. Consider telling her about the people in five states searching through morgues for a Jane Doe that fits her general description. Once they have found one, they will bribe the coroner to identify the girl as one of Buffy’s known aliases and have him trace it back to her name. They’ll make the human call her mother to tell her that her daughter is deceased. Car accident, most likely.

And then the morgue, the body, the paper trail and unfortunately the coroner, too, will catch on fire. You’re paying blood and money to make her safe and she tells you to chill. Yes, you should definitely have snapped her fucking neck. 

Instead you say, “Good. You will take my last name then. Josephine Northman doesn’t sound too bad.”

Her eyes grow wide and your smirk, showing some fang. “It is good cover for both of us. It makes me seem more human and it makes you harder to connect to your old life. You object?”

She shakes her head hard, sending her dark hair flying. She will have to dye it blonde again, like she tells you it was. You will set her up as your younger half sister. Eighteen, fresh out of high school, come to live with her brother to avoid… a divorce perhaps?

“Eighteen?” she blurts, having read your thoughts again. It doesn’t even make you mad anymore.

“No-one will you expect to make yourself younger.”

You can clearly read her next thought on her face, “And I own enough clubs for you to party in without having a fake ID to make you twenty one.”

Her expression clearly states how much she dislikes being classified as a party girl. She might have liked that, once upon a time, but that time is long past. She’s, how does she say, down and dirty with reality now. No more glamour for her. 

“Okay,” she grouches and from what you remember of your human days, she already sounds very much like a little sister. 

“Wonderful,” you retort and stand to leave again. She might have eaten, but you haven’t. 

Your back is already turned to her when she asks out of the blue, “Why are you doing all this?”

You turn back to look at her and find her standing only a few feet away, confusing spilling from her whole body. Gods, she is a fragile thing. If you didn’t know about the steel inside, if you hadn’t seen her kill without hesitation, you would be tempted to simply put her out of her misery and into your stomach. 

But why is she asking you this? You doubt she hasn’t already picked it all out of your brain. As if on cue, she nods, then shakes her head. “I know the reasons. But… I don’t understand. There is no logical reason for you to be doing this. To give me a place to stay, to protect me. To give me your name. Why?”

If it is reassurance she is looking for, you are not sure you can oblige. You do not deal in such silly human things. You consider briefly, telling her of the uses her skill will have for you. Of the Council’s murder of one of yours. Of how having her will garner you respect. All those are logical reasons. All those are perfectly normal things to give as answers. 

All those things are only a fraction of the truth. 

And the rest? Something you dare not speak aloud, something to do with human things, with emotions and memories and want. With the yearning for a companion, for colour in the dark, for laughter at the end of your day. She is not your one true love, is not your salvation, your shining star, sunlight given back to you. But she is _there_. 

And so are you. You both exist, next to each other, for some twisted fucked up reason. You haven’t killed her and she hasn’t killed you and that might be omen enough. All those things are part of the why. 

You take the steps that bring you to her and capture her pink lips in a kiss that is close mouthed and sweet. A simple thing. 

You feel her sag against you the slightest bit and her eyes close. You press another kiss to her forehead. 

Without moving your cold lips from her living skin your murmur, “The wind has its reasons.”

By the time she opens her eyes again, you have already left the house.

+


End file.
